An Information Platform for Low-Literate Villagers

Presently, 75% of the world´s population do not have access to the Internet. Most of them are people at the BOP (Base of the Pyramid, the poorest but largest economic group in the world). Many of the efforts to popularize ICT focus on increasing villagers´ access to facilities and on training in ICT use to demonstrate the power of ICT to bring financial or social benefits. Users are viewed as information consumers only. We have developed an information platform where BOP can be both information producers and owners. In order to generate and upload web contents, the challenges observed are the villagers´ text literacy limitations, the limited capability of the devices they use, and the available network capability. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose a BoP adaptation layer in the current social information infrastructure. This paper introduces the BOP adaptation layer concept, its architecture, and an example of how a low-literate village farmer can generate and upload his/her product information on the web.